Modern society offers people many opportunities and in fact places many demands on people to communicate with each other, often over great distances. One of the most common forms of communication involves conversational speech communicated between two or more parties through a telephone network. Modern society also is becoming increasingly mobile. Many new communications services have emerged, to allow people to communicate freely as they roam, without the need for a fixed network connection. These mobile wireless communication services support traditional voice telephone type two-way communications as well as an increasingly diverse array of data services.
In the United States, the customary billing practice for wireless services has been for the carrier providing the wireless service to bill the subscriber on a monthly basis. Typically, the wireless carrier charges a monthly subscription fee plus per-minute fees for telephone communications over-the-air to and from each subscriber's cellular telephone. The monthly subscription fee may include a specified number of minutes of usage time, in which case, the carrier adds charges for minutes over the subscription allotment. A wireless subscriber pays for any such air-time charges, both on outgoing calls and on incoming calls directed to the subscriber's cellular or PCS telephone.
Hence, in a normal mobile telephone type service, call charges are billed to the subscriber associated with the wireless station after disconnection at the end of the call. Such billing after the call is termed “postpay.” If the calling station is a mobile station, the postpay billing charges include air-time charges and may include long distance charges if applicable. If the called station is a mobile station, the subscriber associated with that station would receive a bill including charges for the air-time for participation in the call. If a mobile station is roaming (operating outside its assigned home access territory), in either situation, the postpay bill sent to the subscriber would include roaming charges added-on to compensate the carrier operating the network in the visited territory. Similar postpay billing techniques are being used for newer message or data services, although in some cases, the time units for billing have been replaced with various types of message or packet units.
On a monthly basis, the wireless service provider's automated billing system accumulates and processes billing records to determine a postpay subscriber's billable activity and generate the bill. The billing system generates a paper invoice, which is mailed to the subscriber for payment, although there have been recent efforts to implement electronic billing and payment schemes. Extensive use of mobile wireless services can run-up considerable unit-based usage charges in a relatively short period of time. A subscriber may be unwilling or unable to promptly pay an unexpectedly high monthly bill. This situation is problematic both for subscribers who are disconcerted by the surprisingly high monthly bill and to carriers who have difficulty collecting fees under many such circumstances.
Wireless carriers have tried a number of alternative billing techniques in an effort to address problems with the traditional postpay billing technique. For example, many wireless service providers now offer one or more prepay billing type service plans. A prepaid wireless service requires the calling subscriber to deposit a certain amount of funds into an account, in advance. As the caller uses the wireless service, usage charges are deducted from the account balance. As long as there are funds remaining in the account, the subscriber may continue to use the wireless service.
For example, U.S. Pat. No. 6,058,300 to Hanson discloses a prepay telecommunications system utilizing a prepay call management platform coupled to a telecommunications carrier switch. The prepay call management platform has access to a customer database, which stores prepay customer data. A prepay call is recognized by the mobile identification number of the calling wireless terminal device, and the network routes the call to the prepay call management platform. The platform looks-up the customer account balance associated with the calling device in the customer database and calculates the maximum allowable call duration based on the expected call costs per minute and the customer account balance. The prepay call is then released to the telecommunications carrier switch for completion to the station of the called party. At the same time, the platform starts a call duration timer set to the calculated maximum allowable call duration. The call is disconnected in response to the call duration timer reaching the maximum allowable duration.
Other Examples of techniques for implementing prepaid service for mobile wireless communication customers are disclosed, for example, in U.S. Pat. No. 6,185,414 to Brunner et al.; U.S. Pat. No. 6,036,090 to Rahman et al., U.S. Pat. No. 6,029,062 to Hanson; U.S. Pat. No. 5,826,185 to Wise et al.; and U.S. Pat. No. 5,359,182 to Schilling.
Many subscribers are reluctant to move to such a prepay type billing plan for their mobile services. The existing prepay systems have required the subscriber/customer to deposit money in advance. If the customer is unwilling to deposit a substantial sum, then the prepaid service is limited by the very small amount actually deposited. While this limits the exposure of the carrier to bad debt, it may not provide the customer with sufficient service to meet their needs. For these and other reasons, many customers prefer to remain with a postpay type option.
Also, postpay service plans often include a wider array of attractive pricing plans. For example, many service providers offer one-rate plans covering wide geographic areas. Depending on the one monthly rate, the subscriber obtains some relatively large number of minutes for usage throughout the chosen geographic area. The covered usage includes all air-time and long distance for calls to and from points within the chosen geographic area, and within that area, there are no roaming charges. Even for usage over the monthly contract number of minutes, only fixed per minute charges apply within the chosen geographic area. At present, prepaid customers are excluded from one-rate services and many other desirable pricing plans developed for postpay customers.
To provide postpay yet mitigate the impact of overusage during a given billing cycle, some of the wireless carriers have made efforts to develop technologies supporting postpay billing plans that incorporate a usage limit. Each of these limited postpay products was centered around the ability to rapidly collect and apply cellular billing records (Call Detail Records—CDR's, Automatic Message Accounting records—AMA) to the customer's billing account in near real-time.
All such approaches have three major disadvantages. First, cellular switches were not always able to provide timely delivery of the AMA records during heavy phone usage periods, resulting in latencies as long as several hours during which customers might run-up unexpected negative balances. Second, the measurement of the call event using this method depended on detecting the end of the call in order to generate the AMA record, allowing a customer to incur a negative balance as a result of an ongoing call before the system could detect that the customer had exceeded his or her spending limit. Third, customer roaming activity could not be measured and included in real-time, because the Cellular Intercarrier Billing Exchange Roamer Record™ (CIBER Record™) information used to bill cellular roaming activity on other carrier networks would arrive up to 30–60 days after the call was made. All three of these problems resulted in increased financial exposure, resulting in increased bad debt to the wireless service provider, despite the efforts to limit or cap the balance on the postpay account. The roaming issue could be resolved by limiting the customers to local calling areas only, but such a limited service may not be acceptable to many customers.
Hence a need exists for an enhanced technique for providing spending limits on postpay billed services provided to customers by carriers operating mobile wireless communication networks. Such an enhanced solution should address the above-stated needs and overcome the noted deficiencies with prior postpay limiting techniques. For example, such a technique should utilize virtually instantaneous information about forms of usage to allow accurate application of the limit in real-time. Such real-time limiting of usage should take into account any and all charges that may apply to each individual customer's service, including by way of example: air-time charges, long distance charges and roaming charges. Also, the limited postpay solution should be readily adaptable to virtually any postpay pricing plan, such as various one-rate services.